Why more people will lose jobs in Obama’s second term

By Tom Quiner

Employees are getting more expensive thanks to Obamacare.

It’s going to be a lot more expensive for small business owners to maintain their current level of employees, much less to hire more once the final Obamacare mandates kick in at the beginning of 2014.

As this blog has discussed, Obamacare mandates that small businesses with 50 or more employees provide health insurance for their employees as of January 1st, 2014. You can’t provide just any ‘ol health insurance, it has to be a gold-plated plan as specified in the 2572 page law.

This adds a cost of $1.79 per hour per employee for small business owners. If you employ rocket scientists who earn $200,000 per year, it’s not as big a deal as if you employ folks who make pizza for you earning $10 per hour.

If the employer chooses not to pay for health insurance, they will be fined. But the fine only costs them 98¢ per hour per employee, which makes this approach more economically feasible.

Either way, Obamacare increases the price to employ people.

The result?

Some people are going to lose their insurance.

Some people are going to lose their insurance AND their job.

And some people who would have been hired will now have to remain on unemployment as the cost of hiring new employees becomes too expensive for the return on investment.

As the economic impact is felt, legislators will probably tinker around the edges to mitigate Obamacare’s irrationality. But we will surely reach a point when Democrats blame high unemployment, stagnant wages, and relentless economic malaise on capitalism and push for a single-payer system.

Obamacare gives Rube Goldberg a bad name.